Not again! Giant Swedish Christmas goat statue gets torched

STOCKHOLM-Arsonists set fire early on Wednesday to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.
Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.
"It's a tradition to burn it down," Lofberg said. "It's happened an untold number of times since the 1960s ... it's been burned down more years than it's survived."
Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes....
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Picture Left:The charred remains of a Christmas straw goat stands in the town center of Gavle, Northern Sweden, on Wednesday Dec. 23, 2009. Torching the goat has become a yuletide tradition, in spite of surveillance cameras and security guards the 43-foot-high (13-meter-high) goat has burned 24 times since it was first set up in 1966 to mark the holiday season.
(AP Photo/Pernilla Wahlman)